The control of minds
Prompted by my scrapbook, I re-looked the actions of my favourite alma mater, this past fortnight
I am back in Bombay, the city I call home, after a year of living out of a suitcase. My sister and I decided to visit home, after we realized that we couldn’t really go anywhere for a change of scene and we had a lot of matters that needed our attention. One of the biggest tasks we had to accomplish was decluttering (nothing to do with Minimalism Now). Being at home, after ages and some big life events (my mom’s passing away, my elder sister’s and my wedding, closing down a business that did not pick up and my younger sister’s hurried move to another city) meant that a lot of detritus of these events needed decision-making. And so over a period of two weeks, my younger sister and I rummaged through our cabinets, cupboards and trundle beds to take things out and let them go. This process, needless to say, instantly brought back memories and one thing that I came across was my scrapbook.
My scrapbook is a product of circa 2001 when I joined St Xavier’s College. As a small fish in a small pond of my convent school in Andheri, I was transformed to be a small fish in a big pond of an institution that boasts celebrities and celebutantes every year of its existence. My college years were no different. Every single day in the newspaper, I would read about seniors from my college doing big things, or sometimes my own classmates being featured there. My teachers were celebrities too (self-propelled if you may, as you will find out shortly) and I would dutifully collect these newspaper sheets and stick these in my scrapbook. I would look longingly at my handiwork, wondering if I would ever be in the newspaper, not as a face in the crowd (which happened during the 2002 edition of the annual college fest, Malhar) but as someone of standing (this happened in 2013 when I was a teacher).
Two weeks ago, I flipped through my scrapbook and read through some of the articles that were in there and, one among the many, especially caught my eye. Priya Ramani wrote the article, about my professor Pratibha Naithani. Naithani, Ramani claimed was a ‘self propelled celebrity’ as she crusaded against adult content being shown on cable television. I read through the article, again, and examined the scathing criticism of my alma mater- about how the prom night was discontinued (at that time, we were told that none of the other Christian colleges were having it), the stringent dress code (girls were showing off their midriff which prevented them from taking out chemicals in the chemistry lab, said Amrita Nadkarni, my sociology professor when she justified the dress code in class) and in general the stifling of free speech, expression and thought. Ramani lamented that students were no longer even thinking for themselves.
I thought deeply about the article and how I was one of those students who were an institution’s dream. I was as compliant as ever, marveling at the professors who were in fact gutsy (Prof. Maureen Almeida of the Psychology Dept, and Dr Eunice De Souza, who retired a few years before I stepped in) and always aspired to be like them. I saw Naithani, who was in fact my favourite professor, as someone strong to voice her opinions and thoughts, but I never really questioned, what were exactly her opinions and thoughts. Did St Xavier’s really succeed in telling me what to think rather than how to think? It did (although I cannot say the same about a number of my classmates) and my consciousness- political, feminist and civic actually came only about more than a decade later during Aam Aadmi Party’s ascent and my recent stint in the UK. Compliance is still my first instinct when I encounter something unexpected and only after some thought I begin to disagree.
I think of this mind set that was fostered in the students of one of the most progressive colleges of this country and think of the recent laws that regulate women’s bodies. (St Xavier’s too, controlled women’s bodies, because men were not allowed to simply wear shorts). In Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chauhan stated that the police would track women in order to keep them safe and Chandramukhi Devi, member of the National Commission For Women, blamed a victim of rape saying that the victim should have not left the house in the evening without a male escort- a statement that she withdrew later. The control of women’s bodies is extensive and sometimes it is easy to see and other times, it is not. Because although the control of women’s bodies is coming to the fore just now, the control of people’s minds began several decades ago.
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Love it! Really enjoyed reading the post ❤️